The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class

Name: The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
Author: David R. Roediger

by David R. Roediger

Whiteness as a wage the boss never had to pay.

For you if

you've wondered why people vote against their own pay.

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Why did so many poor white workers in the nineteenth century side with the bosses instead of with Black workers in the same boat? Roediger borrows W.E.B. Du Bois's answer: whiteness paid a kind of wage, a status that made a hard life feel less like a cage. He follows it through blackface minstrel shows, the language of 'white slavery' and the early labor movement. A book about how a class gets divided by the thing it is told it has.

Where This Book Lives

Themes: capitalism critique class and privilege history from below race and identity systemic racism who tells history

Pass with note. Academic prose and a theory-heavy argument; some historians dispute how far the evidence stretches, so treat it as a thesis, not a settled fact. Roediger has no documented personal concerns. Second-shelf read. Close relatives: Black Marxism, Capitalism and Slavery, White Rage and The Sum of Us.

Same pattern, different era

Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.

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